Mystery and Intelligibility: History of Philosophy as Pursuit of Wisdom ed. by Jeffrey Dirk Wilson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mystery and Intelligibility: History of Philosophy as Pursuit of Wisdom ed. by Jeffrey Dirk Wilson John Marenbon WILSON, Jeffrey Dirk, editor. Mystery and Intelligibility: History of Philosophy as Pursuit of Wisdom. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2021. xi + 262 pp. Cloth, $75.00; eBook $75.00 This book is somewhat less schematic and coherent than the subtitle might suggest. It collects seven essays by different authors, some published previously. Four of them address particular areas and themes in the history of philosophy. Jeffrey Wilson argues that Plato and Aristotle valued Homeric myth by contrast with the demythologizing philosophers who preceded them. Donald Verene also writes about metaphysics and myth, developing ideas from Vico, Kant, Hegel, Bradley, and Cassirer. William Desmond looks at Heraclitus, partly through the eyes of Hegel and Nietzsche. Eric Perl contends that the question "Why is there anything at all?", taken in its "absolute" sense not restricted to concrete objects, is not "distinctively modern" but "has scarcely been asked since the Middle Ages," except by Heidegger. These pieces could be regarded as examples of "history of philosophy as pursuit of wisdom" in practice. It is in the three remaining essays (and the editor's long, programmatic introduction) that the volume makes its theoretical claims. In "What is Philosophy?" Philipp Rosemann does not directly answer his ambitious question but tells us that philosophy is one of four axes, along with "the narrative, the religious, and the political," found "in every field of human experience." The philosophers he considers in this vein are a few celebrated figures of the distant and more recent past: Plato, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein (all figures, interestingly, from outside Rosemann's medieval specialism). His most telling point is perhaps all the stronger for being left unsaid. The three dimensions he specifies are all areas usually neglected by analytical philosophers and historians of philosophy—although politics is indeed frequently treated by them as a special topic, Rosemann has in mind the political dimension of any philosophy, as evinced by Leo Strauss. In his "Guide for the Perplexed," the historian of ancient philosophy John Rist explains "how to present or pervert the history of philosophy." Rist is especially interested in the perversions, as practiced by "sophists," ranging from the assumption that a later philosopher must have read an earlier one, to constructing "dustbin" philosophers to whom a variety of [End Page 609] fragments can be attributed, to the type of charitable interpretation by which a thinker who lived centuries ago is recognized as having produced "a poor man's version of what is better spelled out" by a much more recent one, to the interpretative ruthlessness by which whole passages in old texts are dismissed as "ridiculous" and ignored. The students who can recognize and avoid sophists can genuinely learn philosophy, which Rist, unlike Rosemann, is willing to define: "a love of truth which drives us to try to understand, not various sets of facts about the world, but what the world is, if possible why it is, and what we are ourselves." Rist clearly believes that being taught philosophy, so understood, involves intensive study of past philosophers, because modernity—which he dates to the "new science" of Bacon and Descartes and the "new morality-substitutes of Machiavelli and Hobbes"—is not the only way forward, and it is one of the basic duties of philosophers today to challenge modernity's assumptions. Timothy Noone defends, more explicitly than Rosemann and Rist (who just take it for granted), the view that doing philosophy involves, centrally, studying texts from the past. Noone sets up his own position by contrast with that of another well-known medievalist, Jorge Gracia. For Gracia, although philosophy of the past can have some direct use in suggesting ideas and arguments to philosophers today, and in training students in the art of reasoning, its main value is related to the fact that philosophy is grounded in particular cultures. A knowledge of its history helps us to transcend cultural provincialism. Noone finds that this answer alone does not allow history of philosophy to be sufficiently intimate with and indeed "constitutive of" philosophy. In Noone's view, philosophy is...